264 WHAT IS LIFE ? 



opponents to human progress, in spite of the vested 

 interests of the privileged classes which too often 

 live by chaos and misery, this is the progressive 

 tendency of human affairs. The world is being knit 

 into one commercial whole, only we are progress- 

 ing in the most unsatisfactory, illogical, and clumsy 

 method. 1 



We must mark well there is no precedent for the 

 present condition of things. History cannot help us. 

 Curiously enough, what is termed the educated classes, 

 the classical and orthodox or academical classes, that 

 is, classes which are learned in the past, and which it 

 has been the aim of our great universities to produce, 



by teaching us that law and order, and a definite scheme of develop- 

 ment, regulate even the strangest and wildest manifestations of 

 individual life, she prepares the student to look for a goal even 

 amidst the erratic wanderings of mankind, and to believe that 

 history offers something more than an entertaining chaos a journal 

 of a toilsome, tragicomic march nowhither." (" Lay Sermons, 

 Addresses, and Reviews," T. H. Huxley, LL.D., F.R.S., 1893, 

 p. 75.) 



1 " Man, since we first encounter him, has made ceaseless progress 

 upwards, and this progress continues before our eyes. But it has 

 never been, nor is it now, an equal advance of the whole of the race. 

 Looking back we see that the road by which he has come is strewn 

 with the wrecks of nations, races, and civilisations, that have fallen 

 by the way, pushed aside by the operation of laws which it takes no 

 eye of faith to distinguish at work amongst us at the present time as 

 surely and as effectively as at any past period. Social systems and 

 civilisations resemble individuals in one respect ; they are organic 

 growths, apparently possessing definite laws of health and develop- 

 ment. Such laws science has already defined for the individual : it 

 should also be her duty to endeavour to define them for society.'' 

 (" Social Evolution," Benjamin Kidd, 1895, p. 33.) 



The student of Social Evolution should study that instructive 

 work " The Martyrdom of Man," Winwood Reade. 



